“We can do better” – a volunteer’s perspective of Europe’s refugee response

LESVOS, 5 November 2015 (IRIN) – I didn’t come to Lesvos as a volunteer. I came as a journalist, to report truthfully what I saw there. But in those crucial, urgent moments – when a few people struggle to feed 2,000 or screaming women hold their infants out to you from a storm-battered boat and there is simply no one else to put out their hands and help, you can’t just stand there and ask for an interview. At least, I couldn’t. So my five days on the island became five weeks. And it was in the act of volunteering whatever support was needed that I found the real story of the refugees: the story of how apathy and mismanagement turned a crisis into a tragedy. Read more…